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**
NEW ** Sara Paretsky

Sara
Paretsky is the author of a groundbreaking, enormously popular
(make that beloved), Chicago-based mystery series featuring
V. I. Warshawski, one of the world's first and enduringly
favorite women private eyes. Paretsky introduced her intrepid
and independent hero in 1982 in Indemnity Only
and has written more than a dozen Warshawski novels, each,
according to critics and readers alike, better than the last.
The list includes Bitter Medicine, Guardian Angel, Windy
City Blues, Total Recall, Blacklist,
and Fire
Sale. Not only does Paretsky brilliantly empower
a tough and uncompromising woman sleuth, she also creates
psychologically rich and socially significant stories that
address such urgent matters as corrupt politicians, domestic
violence, homelessness, industrial pollution, organized and
corporate crime, the plight of illegal immigrants, racism,
genocide, and assaults on free speech.

Sara
Paretsky has been designated "Woman of the Year"
by Ms magazine. She has received the Mark Twain Award
and the British Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award,
and Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement Award.
Paretsky founded Sisters in Crime, the thriving advocacy
organization for women mystery writers, and she is a dedicated
social activist in Chicago.

In this unusually revealing conversation, Paretsky talks about
her complex and dramatic novel (right, it's not a mystery),
Bleeding
Kansas, which is loosely based on her Kansan girlhood,
and her exquisite and thought-provoking memoir-in-essays,
Writing
in an Age of Silence.

**
NEW ** Gioia Diliberto

Chicago
writer Gioia Diliberto began her writing life as a journalist,
then transformed herself into a biographer. Focusing on women's
lives, she has written books about the trailblazing
reformer, Jane Addams, the first woman to be awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize; Hadley Richardson Hemingway,
who is fascinating in her own right as well as one of Ernest
Hemingway's stoic wives, and Brenda Frazier, a woman
famous for being famous (the Paris Hilton of her day), a celebrated
beauty and New York high-society debutante.

Diliberto
then brought her insights into women's lives -- how women
navigate our male-dominated society, how beauty is both a
boon and a bane -- to her novels, along with her passionate
for fashion and art. The result is supple fiction elegantly
laced with fact and social commentary. A mysterious painting
by John Singer Sargent inspired Diliberto's first profoundly
pleasurable and illuminating historical novel, the critically
acclaimedI
Am Madame X. The struggles and genius of Coco
Chanel propelled Diliberto's second smart and entrancing novel,
The Collection. Diliberto is now exploring the
world of the flapper.

It's
worth quoting a line from The
Collection, that perfectly encapsulates Diliberto's
point of view. Chanel tells her protégé Isabelle,
"A woman's mind is the sexiest thing about her."

**
NEW ** Billy Lombardo

Billy
Lombardo began his literary adventures on the Chicago slam
poetry scene. To support his writing habit, and to spread
the word about the importance of literature, Lombardo teaches
writing at the Latin School, where he oversees production
of Polyphony H.S., an innovative literary magazine
for high-school writers.

"Every
male writer writing about growing up in Chicago, from John
McNally to Adam Langer, does so in the shadow of Stuart Dybek,
the celebrated author of I Sailed with Magellan (2003). Happily,
first-time author Lombardo manages to be inspired by Dybek
while refining his own voice in this sweetly soulful coming-of-age
short story collection. Preternaturally observant, young Petey
lives in an Italian enclave in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood
in the early 1970s. This is a working-class world, and Lombardo
lovingly describes everything from how to mop a floor to how
to fill a cannoli, but he is also aware of nature's power,
the source of his stories' vivid metaphors and exaltation.
As Petey's family struggles to survive and he heads into adolescence
and learns how to navigate his home turf, Lombardo gets everything
right, from a sensitive boy's struggle to say and do the right
thing in delicate situations to Chicago's impossible weather,
as he celebrates the marvels of boyhood and everyday life."

Lombardo
is a distinctly compassionate, candid, and questioning writer,
generous and hard-driving. Soon to appear is a poetry collection,
Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, coming out from EM
Press, and a novel-in-stories, How to Hold a Woman,
from OV Books.

**
NEW ** Elizabeth Berg

Elizabeth
Berg is the author of 16 novels, most of which have been bestsellers.
Here's a short list: Durable Goods, Talk Before Sleep,
Joy School, Open House, The Art of Mending, The Year of Pleasure,
We
Are All Welcome Here, and Dream
When You're Feeling Blue. These are novels lush
with tenderness, humor, curiosity, wonder, and clear thinking
about the amazing power of kindness and patience. Berg is
a deceptively direct storyteller; her charm and affection
conceal great literary and conceptual sophistication. A nurse
before she became a writer, Berg loves life, and insists on
having a good time, even when she's writing about very tough
and despairing subjects. Readers recognize empathy and authenticity
when they find it, and Berg is the genuine article.

Alas, this is a field recording, and the quality is poor.
We sound as though we're on a plane. But it's worth putting
up with the hum. Honestly. Elizabeth Berg would be worth listening
to in a torrential downpour, at a NASCAR race, in a trading
pit at the stock exchange. And really, the recording is way
better than all that. Listen.

**
NEW ** Laura Lippman

The
daughter of a reporter and a librarian, Laura Lippman came
by her passion for story and truth naturally. Raised in Baltimore,
Maryland, she followed her highly respected journalist father,
Theo Lippman, Jr., to the Baltimore Sun. Deeply
affected by the suffering she witnessed, and seeking an outlet
for murderous rage, she began to write mystery novels set
in Baltimore and starring a reporter turned private detective,
the down-to-earth, acid-tongued, womanly wise, and blessedly
human Tess Monaghan.

Lippman's
first Tess Monaghan mystery was Baltimore Blues
(1997), and as the Monaghan chronicles roared on (In
a Strange City By a Spider's Thread No Good Deeds),
Lippman gathered up the mystery genre's coveted awards,
namely the Agatha, the Anthony, the Edgar, the Wolfe, and
the Shamus. Lippman also writes stand-alone novels, including
What
the Dead Know, To the Power of Three
and Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned
for the movies by Academy Award-winner France McDormand. Further
proof of Lippman's creative energy and versatility and complex
sensibility and compassion is found in her superb and shivery
forthcoming short story collection, which is enthusiastically
introduced by George Pelecanos, Hardly Knew Her.

Laura Lippman and I got together in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
at a Public Library Association conference, and talked intently
about her then current Tess Monaghan novel, Another
Thing to Fall, reading, writing, and justice.

**
NEW ** Dika Lam (with Stacy Bierlein and Gina Frangello)

Canadian-born
and Brooklyn-based, Dika Lam is has received aNew York
Times Fellowship from New York University,
a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers
Conference, and is a winner of the Bronx Writers' Center
Chapter One Contest. Her work has appeared in Story,
One Story, and the Cincinnati Review,
and her stories have been anthologized in Scribner's Best
of the Fiction Workshops, 1999 and This Is Not
Chick Lit.

Lam
is also a contributor to the anthology A Stranger Among
Us: Stories of Cultural Collision and Connection;
her story is titled "Fresh Off the Boat." She joined
the book's editor, Stacy Bierlein and contributor and publisher
Gina Frangello on a field edition of Open Books to talk about
A
Stranger Among Us at the Printers Row Book
Fair in Chicago in June 2008.

**
NEW ** Stacy Bierlein (with Dika Lam and Gina Frangello)

Stacy
Bierlein is a writer, a founding editor of OV Books,
and a well-traveled literary activist. In creating the anthology,
A Stranger among Us: Stories of Cultural Collision
and Connection, Bierlein "hoped to collect
stories that told me something I could not have imagined."
She also "aimed to collect stories where issues of identity
emerged in active dialogues between members of different cultures.
Bierlein continues, ". . . culture was open to a wide
variety of interpretations by writers of divergent histories
and passions. We set out to examine the universal desire to
connect, as well as the frustrating difficulties of those
connections."

"Us
versus them" is the human equation, even though all designations,
whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, geography, language,
or class, are in constant flux. Our family trees all share
roots, and now more than ever, people live in culturally jumbled
places other than their familial home ground. Displacement,
exile, the quest for a better life, bridging cultures, the
ripples sent out by the question "What are you?"-all
are ripe fruit for fiction writers. With an eye to short stories
stemming from diverse cultures and exploring the state of
outsiderness, editor Bierlein has selected 30 vibrant, unpredictable,
and magnetic works that together span the spectrum from funny
to tragic, earthy to rarefied. Stories of sharp revelation
and resonance are triggered by moments small or wrenching,
such as the swimming lesson in Shubha Venugopal's "Bhakthi
in the Water," a meal in Carolyn Alessio's "Currency,"
or prayer in Luis Alfaro's "Border Crossings." Wanda
Coleman, Nathan Englander, Laila Lalami, Samrat Upadhyay,
Josip Novakovich, and many new or underrecognized writers
reconfigure the human experience in this richly kaleidoscopic
anthology. - Donna Seaman

Stacy
Bierlein and contributors Gina Frangello and Dika Lam spoke
with Open Books at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago
in June 2008.

**
NEW ** Gina Frangello (with Dika Lam and Stacy Bierlein)

Gina
Frangello's short stories have been published in many venues,
including Clackamas Literary Review, StoryQuarterly,
Prairie Schooner, Swink, and the anthology Homewrecker:
An Adultery Reader. Frangello was the editor for Other
Voices; she co-founded OV Books, and guest-edited
the fiction anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of
Fathers and Daughters. Her first novel, My
Sister's Continent, was one of the ten best
books of the year selected by Las Vegas City Life. Her
second novel,London Calling, is due out soon.

Smart
and funny romance writer Connie Brockway published her first
book, Promise Me Heaven, in 1994, and she's
been busy inventing tricky predicaments and appealing characters
ever since. Her list of novels is nearing 20, and she'll
soon have nearly 2 million books in print in more than
a dozen countries.

Readers love Brockway, and the critics concur with starred
reviews in the prepubs, particularly Booklist, which
placed Brockway's novel My Seduction on a Top
10 romance list. Brockway has won the prestigious Romance
Writers of America RITA Award twice, her books regularly
appear on national and regional bestseller lists and
are frequent Doubleday/Literary Guild selections.

Adept
at both contemporary (Hot Dish) and historical
romances (My Dearest Enemy), Brockway reports
that her next book, So Enchanting, is of the
latter persuasion. This conversation, which took place at
the 2008 Public Library Association conference in Minneapolis,
not far from Brockway's Minnesota home, revolves around the
contemporary romance, Skinny
Dipping, and reveals much about the often misunderstood
romance genre.

Yannick
Murphy

Yannick
Murphy is a remarkably original and lyrical fiction writer.
The author of two powerful short story collections -- her
first book, Stories in Another Language and
her newest, In a Bear's Eye -- Murphy has written
three stunning novels: The Sea of Trees, Here
They Come, and her current triumph, the hauntingly
beautiful Signed,
Mata Hari. Recognized with an O'Henry Prize,
a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship, Yannick Murphy also writes children's
books.

Jonathan
Messinger

Jonathan
Messinger is the books editor for Time Out Chicago;
a cofounder of Featherproof Books, a gutsy Chicago
small press, and creator of the popular reading and performance
series, The Dollar Store. Messinger is also the author
of the short story collection Hiding
Out, an impressive debut. Each story begins with
a line drawing by Rob Funderburk of a disheveled male wedged
in a corner or lying bent around a couch or a refrigerator,
or prone under a coffee table or crammed under a desk. Hunched,
slumped, defeated guys hiding in plain sight, seeking camouflage
and comfort from large inanimate objects. Messinger's prose
is the literary equivalent of the line drawings -- deceptively
simple and direct, covertly hard-hitting. And his smartly
plotted, unpredictable, and penetrating stories convey a rich
spectrum of emotions from sly humor to quiet desperation.

Seth
Kantner

A
native Alaskan, Seth Kantner is a photographer and writer
whose work expresses his love for the land and its animals,
and his belief in wildness and the importance of keeping wilderness
wild. A recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, he
has been published in Outside magazine, Alaska
magazine, Reader's Digest, Prairie
Schooner, and other journals. Kantner is also the
author of Ordinary
Wolves, an impressively fluent, many-faceted tragicomedy
of Alaskan life, and winner of the Milkweed National Fiction
Prize, which is awarded to works of high literary quality
that embody humane values and contribute to cultural understanding.

Elizabeth
Gaffney (with Rene Steinke)

Elizabeth
Gaffney was a staff editor for the Paris Review
under George Plimpton's watch from 1989 to 2005, and she is
now editor-at-large for the literary magazine A
Public Space. Gaffney's debut novel, Metropolis,
is a remarkably rich and ambitious work set in New York City
just after the end of the Civil War. A capacious and frenetic
novel about work, crime, immigration, race, and the evolution
of a city, it is anchored to two of the grandest and most
innovative structures of the time, New York's vast and elaborate
sewer system and the Brooklyn Bridge, two engineering marvels
that can be read as symbols of the two worlds Gaffney dramatizes,
the underworld of the city's gangs, and the rarefied realm
of art.

Rene
Steinke (with Elizabeth Gaffney)

Rene
Steinke is editor-in-chief for The Literary Review,
and the author of two novels, The Fires and
Holy
Skirts. A finalist for the National Book Award,
Holy Skirts is a fictionalized account of the
life of a remarkable artist and audacious woman, the Baroness
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an ultra avant-garde, German-born
artist, poet, daring performance artist, and agent provocateur.
An enigmatic, androgynous, and eccentric figure with a shaved,
sometimes shellacked head, teaspoons for earrings, and a cancelled
postage stamp on her cheek, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927)
challenged every convention known to gender and art over the
course of her relentlessly adventurous, inventive, and theatrical
life, greatly influencing better known artists, especially
Marcel Duchamp. Steinke's empathic, gorgeously written, and
dramatic novel reclaims and interprets a rare spirit.

Faith
Sullivan

Faith
Sullivan, who describes herself as a "demon gardener,
flea marketer, and feeder of birds," has been writing
novels since 1975, and is best-known and most cherished for
her stories of women and families living in Harvester, Minnesota,
during the cruel years of the Great Depression and the two
world wars. Sullivan's novel The Cape Ann launched
her heartland series, which includes The Empress of
One, What a Woman Must Do, and Gardenias.
Sullivan's novels are quietly powerful in their social and
psychological insights and tremendous empathy for women forever
caught in the double-bind of sexism. And Sullivan is incisive,
uncommonly commonsensical, generous, and funny in person.

Junot
Diaz

Born
in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Junot
Diaz wowed readers and critics alike with the potent short
story collection Drown
in 1996. Newsweek and the New Yorker named Diaz
one of the hottest writers going, and since then he
has received a phenomenal number of major awards, including
the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, the
PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship,
a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship,
and fellowships from the NEA and the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. Junot Diaz's intrepid and radiant first
novel is The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a family saga
that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the
reign of the dictator Trujillo. Díaz's besieged characters
look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from fukú,
the curse "unleashed" when Europeans arrived on
Hispaniola, to the forces dramatized in the works of science
fiction and fantasy so beloved by the chubby "ghetto
nerd" Oscar Wao, the brilliantly realized boy of conscience
at the center of this whirlwind tale. Writing in a combustible
mix of slang and lyricism, Díaz loops back and forth
in time and place, generating sly and lascivious humor in
counterpoint to tyranny and sorrow.

Ann
Patchett

Ann
Patchett has the magic touch. Laser-smart and remarkably adept,
she has created an entirely new universe in each of her resplendent
novels. The Patron Saint of Liars was a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year. Taft
won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. With The
Magician's Assistant, Patchett received a Guggenheim.
Bel Canto, a huge success with readers, won
the PEN/Faulkner Award, England's Orange Prize,
and the Book Sense Book of the Year Award. So appealing
is Bel Canto, it has been translated into 30
languages. Patchett's powerful memoir about her close friend,
Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face), Truth
& Beauty, won an Books for a Better Life
Award. Patchett's work appears in Harper's,
the Atlantic Monthly, Gourmet,
Vogue, and the Washington Post.
Patchett's new novel is Run.

George
Saunders

The
most unnerving fiction boldly envisions the dire consequences
of our most hubristic tendencies: our bottomless greed, maniacal
competitiveness, hyper-materialism, environmental obliviousness,
spiritual callousness, and fear of being different. This is
George Saunders' territory. A writer of mordant wit and stinging
insights following in the footsteps of Orwell, Bradbury, and
Vonnegut, Saunders is a master of the surreal, or it is the
ultra-real, short story. Saunders' droll, inventive, and compassionate
fiction is collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,
Pastorlia, and In
Persuasion Nation.

Saunders
has also written a live-wire satirical novel or fable,The
Brief and Frightening
Reign of Phil, which is acquiring new power and
relevance during this interminable presidential campaign,
and a collection of fresh, hilarious, and profound essays,
The
Braindead Megaphone, in which Saunders' predilection
for acrobatic parody and attunement to language's moral dimension
are working in full force. A recipient of both Guggenheim
and MacArthur fellowships and a number of National
Magazine Awards, Saunders writes for the New Yorker,
Harper's, and GQ. But it's not
all smooth sailing, Saunders was subjected to an appearance
on The Colbert Report.

John
Green

John
Green entered the book world as an editorial assistant in
the books for youth section at Booklist. Now he is
a wildly popular young adult novelist. His first book, Looking
for Alaska,a
suspenseful tale set at a boarding school in Alabama, won
the Michael L. Printz Award, and thrilled a great many
readers from tweens to oldsters. Green's zanily mathematical
and anagram-filled second novel, An
Abundance of Katherines, is a funny and clever
tale about a prodigy who keeps getting involved with and dumped
by girls named Katherine. Both novels were finalists for
the Los Angeles Times Book Award. John Green writes for
Mental Floss Magazine, and, thanks to his friendship
with mathematician Daniel Bliss, a consultant for An Abundance
of Katherines and a candidate for the Illinois state legislature,
John Green has been featured in the Wall Street Journal
for his innovation support (it involves a liquefied Happy
Meal) of Biss's campaign on the video blog he shares with
his brother, Hank Green (www.ecogeek.org)
Brotherhood 2.0.

Valerie
Wilson Wesley

Former
executive editor of Essence magazine, and now
a best-selling fiction writer, Valerie Wilson Wesley
has channeled her insights into women's lives, how children
learn, race and ethnicity, community, and moral dilemmas into
several genres, from her marvelously smart and funny children's
series, Willimena Rules, which includes How
to Fish for Trouble and How to Lose Your Cookie
Money, to her acclaimed and wildly popular mystery
series starring Tamara Hayle. Hayle is an African American
woman raising her son on her own, and story is told in Dying
in the Dark and the forthcoming Of Blood
and Sorrow. Valerie Wilson Wesley also writes straight-ahead
novels, among them Always True to You in My Fashion,
Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do, which received
an award for excellence from the Black Caucus of the American
Library Association, and Playing
My Mother's Blues. Valerie Wilson Wesley is a
writer of deep emotional resonance, and of sharp humor.

Chris
Abani

Chris Abani is a poet and novelist of exceptional powers.
Born in Nigeria, where he was imprisoned for his writing at
the precocious and vulnerable age of 16, Chris Abani went
into exile in 1991, living in England and currently, in the
U.S. His poetry collections include Daphne's Lot,
Dog Woman, and Hands
Washing Water. Chris Abani's novels include the
searing Becoming Abigail; the extraordinary
GraceLand, the story of a teenaged Nigerian
Elvis impersonator; the incandescentThe
Virgin of Flames, a novel of post-9/11 Los Angeles
and a quest for artistic expression and spiritual clarity;
and Song
for Night, an empathic portrait of a West African
boy soldier. Chris Abani's awards include the PEN Hemingway
Book Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California
Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Russell
Banks

A
great American fiction writer, Russell Banks is the author
of many powerful works about individuals and societies in
profound conflict, including Continental Drift,
Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter,
and
The Darling. Affliction and The
Sweet Hereafter have both been made into exceptionally
fine films. Russell Banks' numerous awards include a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship,
the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature
Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Robert
Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler has written first-person narratives
from a spectacular array of perspectives. He gives voice to
Vietnamese refugees living in Louisiana in his Pulitzer
Prize-winning collection of linked stories Good
Scent from a Strange Mountain; an extraterrestrial
in Mr. Spaceman; a complicated and captivating
female auctioneer in Fair Warning, and in Tabloid
Dreams, a nine-year-old boy who confronts mobsters,
JFK, and a parrot. The cryptic messages on the back of early
twentieth-century postcards inspired Had
a Good Time. Severance
is a startling collection of very short stories, prose poems
really, containing the last synaptic firings of individuals
who have just been beheaded. Butler's ability to inhabit the
minds of diverse characters is derived from both an unfettered
imagination and boundless empathy. Butler's humor is droll,
clever, and supple, and his approach to fiction is profound,
as explained in From Where You Dream.

Butler has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National
Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Richard and Hinda
Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robert Olen Butler appeared on Open Books in November 2006.

Michael
Chabon

Michael
Chabon is a phenomenally imaginative, compassionate, funny,
and soulful fiction writer who delights in bringing his exceptional
literary gifts to genre fiction to create new and vital hybrids.
He became instantly famous at age 25 with the publication
of his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,
and went on to write the compelling and many-faceted Wonder
Boys; the exquisite and tender short story collections
A Model World and Werewolves in their
Youth; a homage to Sherlock Holmes, The Final
Solution, and a fantasy novel for young adults, Summerland.
Every transporting book is a surprise, but Chabon's Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a tale
of two Jewish cousins who help create the golden years of
comic book superheroes, is an extraordinarily generous and
encompassing work about the legacy of the Holocaust and the
liberating power of the imagination. Chabon has also written
a wily mystery/speculative novel, The
Yiddish Policemen's Union, set in a fictional
Jewish community in Alaska, and a swashbuckling adventure,
first serialized in the New York Times, then
released in book form, Gentlemen of the Road.
Michael Chabon appeared on Open Books in May 2007.

Vikram
Chandra

Vikram Chandra is the author of three acclaimed works
of fiction. Born in New Delhi, he majored in English at Pomona
College and studied film at Columbia University, tentatively
following in his screenwriter and director mother's footsteps.
His first book, the novel Red
Earth and Pouring Rain, won the Commonwealth
Writers' Prize, as did his collection of short stories,Love
and Longing in Bombay. The dazzlingly and all-encompassing
Sacred
Games is a magnificent novel of Mumbai and a cosmic
detective story of amazing amplitude and complexity involving
a Sikh police inspector and a legendary gangster, not to mention
Bollywood, a diabolical guru, and an apocalyptic vision.

Sandra
Cisneros

Sandra
Cisneros, a poet and a fiction writer, was born and raised
in Chicago, and the city plays a significant role in her
work. Her saucy poems are collected in Loose Women
and My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Cisnero's
first novel, the groundbreaking The House on Mango
Street, has been included on countless high school
and college required reading lists, sold more than two million
copies, and transformed American literature with its uniquely
poetic take on that rite of passage known as coming-of-age,
urban life, the immigrant experience in general, and that
of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in particular. Woman
Hollering Creek is a collection of funny, candid,
and provocative stories about Mexican American girls and
women. The extraordinarily rich and enveloping Caramelo
is a many-faceted multigenerational family saga that weaves
back and forth between Chicago and Mexico, and the complications
of private life and the influence of cultural icons. Cisneros
has received numerous prestigious awards, including the
American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award,
and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Cisneros appeared
on Open Books in 2003.

Kathryn
Davis

Beginning with Labrador, a complex, otherworldly
tale of two sisters, Kathryn Davis has cast a spell that has
held readers transfixed over the course of six original and
affecting novels. The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf
tells the story of two women, one a composer working on an
opera based on a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Hell
is a blend of mystery and surreal fantasy. The
Walking Tour metamorphoses from a literary novel
about two couples traveling in Wales into a mystery that stealthily
acquires the aura of science fiction. In Versailles,
Davis creates a curious form of historical fiction.

Davis
traces the great singing web of life and the long-fingered
shadow of death, and in The
Thin Place, animal and plants are brought to
conscious life as she explores the permeable divide between
the past and the present, the living and the dead, the natural
and the supernatural, the human and the divine. This conversation
took place when Kathryn Davis came to Chicago in February
2006.

Stuart
Dybek

A
quintessential Chicago writer, Stuart Dybek grew up in the
working-class neighborhood known as Pilsen, the setting
for many of the stories in his celebrated collections, Childhood
and Other Neighborhoods, The
Coast of Chicago, and I
Sailed with Magellan. A writer preternaturally
attuned to both beauty and absurdity, the real and the surreal,
Dybek's penetrating vision of Chicago's steely reality and
penchant for risk-all romance underlies his exquisitely
crafted, urban and down-to-earth, mischievously funny, and
ravishing short stories and his poems, which have been collected
in Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their
Own Ink. A generous teacher and mentor, Dybek inspires
and supports many emerging writers. His work has appeared
in The New Yorker, The
Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry,
and The Paris Review; Dybek has received many
awards, including several O. Henry Prizes, a PEN/Bernard
Malamud Prize, and a Whiting Writer's Award.

Jennifer
Egan

Egan is both a captivating storyteller and an incisive
social observer. Creative and venturesome, she has taken a
different approach in each of her fictional works, and all
are shaped by her beautifully calibrated lyricism, precise
psychology, uncanny insights into cultural trends, and keen
satire. Egan is fascinated by the interplay between the world
of appearances and the inner realm of feeling and thought,
and considers with open-mindedness our longing for transcendence.

This
preoccupation with the Wizard-of-Oz-like aspect of existence
and our spiritual impulse shaped her accomplished first
novel, The Invisible Circus. Emerald
City and Other Stories is an outstanding collection
of elegant and poignant short stories. In the novel Look
at Me, Egan combines a penetrating look at the
culture of the image, the fashion industry, and the shift
from the industrial age to the information age. Writing
before 9/11, Egan anticipated the reality TV craze, Web
cams, and YouTube, and presciently imagined a Muslim terrorist
in a Midwestern town. In The
Keep, a cleverly constructed riff on gothic
novels, Egan carries forward her inquiry into our obsession
with digital technologies and our sense of connectivity
even when we're terribly alone. Jennifer Egan spoke about
her work in Chicago in September 2006.

Donald
Evans

Chicago
writer Donald G. Evans is a former sports writer for the Chicago
Sun-Times. He has also been an editor, photojournalist,
reporter, teacher, and columnist. Evans short stories have
earned him a citation in Best American Short Stories' "100
Most Distinguished" and two Pushcart Prize
nominations. A former serious gambler and part-time bookie,
he is now is a stay- at-home dad and a writer. His roguishly
witty first novel, Good
Money After Bad, revolves around a Chicago gambler
named Chance living within earshot of Wrigley Field, and dangerously
addicted to sports betting. Evans is a terrifically atmospheric
writer, deftly evoking the world of bookies and compulsive
gamblers, the tensions of in a big city undergoing lots of
changes, a surreally severe heat wave, and the consequences
of secret desperation. Combining the blue-collar, neighborhood-anchored
aesthetic Chicago writers are known for with a touch of suavely
boozy noir, a sliver of medical-thriller action, and loads
of charm, Evans tells a rascally and edgy cautionary tale.
Donald G. Evans took a chance on Open Books in June 2007.

Mary
Gordon

Mary
Gordon is fascinated with deception and contradiction, religion
and art, family secrets and social upheavals. A consummate
short story writer, Gordon is renowned for her potent and
risky novels, including Final Payments, The
Other Side, The Rest of Life,
Spending, and Pearl.
Mary Gordon has also written a brief life of Joan of Arc,
and three galvanizing memoirs notable for their candor,
artistry, and unsettling disclosures: The Shadow Man,
Seeing Through Places, and Circling
My Mother.

Keir
Graff

Keir
Graff is a novelist from Montana living in Chicago where he
is also editor for Booklist Online, and keeper of the
blog, Likely Stories. Dont be confused by the
appearance of Michael McCulloch, author of the noir novel
Cold Lessons, at the start of the interview,
all will become clear as we discuss the books protagonist,
Gil Strickland, a hard-drinking high school English teacher,
and the cold cruel world in which he runs amok.My Fellow Americans, by Keir Graff, is a
speculative novel in which the president of the U.S. declares
martial law in the face of terrorist attacks, and stays in
power for a third term. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Jason Walker,
amateur photographer and architecture enthusiast, runs afoul
of Homeland Security, who find it awfully interesting that
hes half-Lebanese. Keir Graff spoke to Open Books in
March 2007.

Jane
Hamilton

Perhaps
living and working on a Wisconsin apple orchard inspires
Jane Hamilton to take risks in her fiction. Nature, after
all, is a grand experiment in the reconciliation of extremes
as years of human effort can be erased in a matter of hours
while life persists in the harshest and most volatile of
circumstances. In each of her five novels, she orchestrates
seasons of suffering and amplitude, harrowing storms and
epic droughts as she weighs the good and the bad in the
repertoire of human behavior. Lyrical yet earthy, tragic
yet droll, her complex tales of human quests for understanding
are seeded in the stoic Midwest and rooted in extended families.
Jane Hamilton has been an Oprah Book Club twice for
her first two novels, The Book of Ruth and
A Map of the World. The author of The
Short History of a Prince, Disobedience,
and When
Madeline Was Young, Hamilton has also been awarded
the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Jane Hamilton
appeared on Open Books in September 2006.

Jamaica
Kincaid

Jamaica
Kincaid is a persistently autobiographical writer whether
she's writing about family, colonialism, or gardening, and
her work is charged with a sense of urgency as she seeks
understanding of the past and of how it shapes the present.
Born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua, came to the U.S.,
changed her name, and became a staff writer for The
New Yorker (many of her essays are collected in
Talk Stories). Kincaid's fiction debut was
the impressionistic story collection At the Bottom
of the River. Annie John was her first
novel, and the dawning of her signature voice with its deft
interweaving of inner and outer realms, its exacting yet
poetically resonant descriptions, and its incantatory musicality
and stream of consciousness. Other novels followed, including
the intense and cathartic expression in The Autobiography
of My Mother and Mr.
Potter. Kincaid also writes potent and distinctive
nonfiction, including My
Brother and Among Flowers: A Walk in the
Himalaya. Jamaica Kincaid spoke on Open Books in
2002.

John
McNally

The author of a short story collection, Troublemakers,
John McNally proved himself to be a smart and nimble comedic
novelist in The Book of Ralph, a marvelously inventive
coming-of-age story set in Burbank, Illinois, a seedy old
suburb south of Chicago. In his second satiric tale of Midwest
angst, America's
Report Card, an even more mordantly hilarious
and right-on tale, McNally returns to Burbank to tell the
story of Jainey O'Sullivan. On the verge of turning 18, she
is burdened with a family beyond dysfunctional. McNally's
flair for the absurd, poker-face humor, and hilarious critique
of the fear-mongering Bush years, are matched by his pitch-perfect
ear for dialogue, sure pacing, and tender regard for humankind.

A
graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, McNally is also
a dynamic anthologist. He has created High Infidelity:
24 Great Short Stories About Adultery, Bottom
of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories,
Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color,
The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students
and Professors, and When
I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School
. John
McNally appeared on Open Books in Chicago in July 2006.

Joe
Meno

Comedic, imaginative, empathic, and romantic, Chicago
writer Joe Meno is particularly attuned to the intelligence
and sorrows of children, and to the ways childhood haunts
our adult lives. And as different as each of his works are--from
his short story collection Bluebirds
Used to Croon in the Choir to his novels Tender
as Hellfire, How the Hula Girl Sings,
Hairstyles
of the Damned, and the truly remarkable The
Boy Detective Fails -- Meno is consistently compassionate
in his approach to loneliness and loss, the poignancy of our
effort to combat chaos with reason, and the terror of realizing
that the everyday world is full of menace. And yet, Meno's
characters discover that there is power in kindness, intelligence,
and persistence.

Meno,
a recipient of the Nelson Algren Award and the Society
for Midland Author Award, teaches in the Fiction Department
at Columbia College Chicago. Joe Meno was a guest on Open
Books in September 2004.

Lydia
Millet

The
bewitchment of Millet's unusual fiction derives from its
fusing of lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-outness,
her heightened social conscience, and her gift for cloaking
moral and spiritual inquiries within inventive plotlines
and the psyches of deep-feeling characters. My Happy
Life (2002), winner of the PEN-USA Award for
Fiction, is a harrowing yet poetic tale of one woman's
suffering and transcendence. In Everyone's Pretty
(2005), a pornographer, his pious sister, a midget, a math
prodigy, a bombshell, and a Christian Scientist ponder sex,
God, and the search for meaning. Oh
Pure and Radiant Heart is a brilliant and madcap
novel about the collision between science and faith and
the dark discovery that forever altered life on earth, the
making of the atomic bomb. How
the Dead Dream is a haunting novel about suffering
of animals as humankind becomes the dominant force on the
planet and we enter an age of extinction. A profoundly humanist
and satirical writer in the constellation that includes
Twain, Vonnegut, Murakami, and DeLillo, Millet is a write
ascending.

Audrey
Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger, a Chicago writer and an artist who
makes fine art books the old-fashioned way, is best-known
for her first novel, the internationally acclaimed bestseller
novel, The
Time Traveler's Wife, an evocative blend of science
fiction and straight-ahead literature. Niffenegger is also
the creator of two elegant novels-in-pictures, The
Three Incestuous Sisters and The
Adventuress. Niffenegger's stunningly moody prints
possess the sly gothic subversion of Edward Gorey, the emotional
valence of Edvard Munch, and her own brilliant use of iconographic
pattern, surprising perspective, and tensile line in the service
of a delectably otherworldly sensibility. Audrey Niffenegger
teaches at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and
Paper Arts. This conversation took place in September 2005.

Harry
Mark Petrakis

Harry Mark Petrakis is a quintessential Chicago storyteller,
one of the most compelling and venerable writers ever to walk
this blustery city's streets and look into the heart of its
struggling and blessed citizens. The author of nine novels,
including A Dream of Kings, which was made into
a film starring Anthony Quinn, The Hour of the Bell,
Nick the Greek, Days of Vengeance,
Twilight
of the Ice, The
Orchards of Ithaca, Petrakis has also written
short story collections, including the must-have Collected
Storiesand his most recent, Legends
of Glory and Other Stories. Petrakis is also a
memoirist and essayist; his collections include the wonderfully
candid and very moving Tales of the Heart.

A
legend and an inspiration to many, a man of warmth and wisdom,
Harry Mark Petrakis has seen many changes in life and literature.
He appeared on Open Books in March 2004.

Alexis
Pride

Chicago
writer Alexis J. Pride is a playwright, producer, founder
of the AJ Ensemble Theater Company, a professor of creative
writing at Columbia College Chicago, and a fiction writer.
Her first novel, Where
the River Ends, is a fiery fictionalization of
the life of a revolutionary and controversial Chicago educator,
Corla Hawkins, known far and wide as Momma Hawk. Pride's protagonist,
Emma Rivers, battles her way through a rough girlhood on the
South Side during the 1950s. She found refuge in books, but
suffered betrayal and violence at the hands of those she loved
best. Emma struggles mightily against great odds to get control
of her life, becoming a teacher and a principal renowned for
her unorthodox style and profound dedication to inner-city
children. Pride's intense and insightful novel dramatizes
the trauma engendered by the cruel matrix of poverty, racism,
and sexism in an indelible portrait of a courageous teacher
able to transform the lives of neglected teens because she
needs them as much as they need her. Alexis Pride appeared
on Open Books in May 2007.

Susan
Straight

Susan
Straight writes empathic and dramatic fiction about family,
race, class, immigration, men and women, and the long shadow
of slavery. She is the author of six powerful novels: Aquaboogie,
I Been in Sorrow's Kitchenand Licked Out
All the Pots, Blacker than a Thousand Midnights,
The Gettin' Place, Highwire
Moon, a National Book Award Finalist,
and A
Million Nightingales, a lyrical historical novels
and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards.
Straight is also a superlative essayist and writes commentary
for National Public Radio. The recipient of a Lannan
Foundation Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship,
she teaches creative writing at the University of California
at Riverside, her lifelong hometown. Susan Straight spoke
on Open Books in May 2006. Read
an excerpt of the transcript of her interview.

Mark
Swartz

Mark
Swartz is nervy, inventive, and very funny writer, a satirist
intrigued with individuals and societies run amok. His first
novel, Instant
Karma, is about a brooding loner who feeds his
mania in Chicagos main library, thus challenging our
belief in the library as a temple of learning, the wellspring
of humanitarian enlightenment, a pleasure palace for those
who live ecstatic lives of the mind. Swartz suggests that
reading can become a perilously isolating and alienating obsession,
and that the library can be an overwhelming and bewildering
labyrinth, an oppressive manifestation of the mind's complexity
and humanity's folly.

In
H2O,
Swartz zaps forward in time to depict Chicago as a chaotic
and decrepit city-state. Clean tap water is but a cherished
memory, so toxic is Lake Michigan. In fact, the earth's entire
freshwater supply is imperiled. Enter Hayden Shivers, a hapless
filter and drain engineer who discovers a miracle. Swartz's
shrewd, jittery, and noirishly atmospheric speculative tale
about a bumbling antihero and dire environmental trauma brings
an irreverent and parrying voice to ecofiction and casts a
fractured light on follies petty and catastrophic. Mark Swartz
appeared on Open Books in January 2007.

Jean
Thompson

Heartland
writer Jean Thompson forges adept and imaginative tragicomedy
fueled by her fascination with just how awry things can
get and just how outrageously we can run amok. Evincing
a dry and precise wit and an impressive fluency in inner
monologues induced by long-stoked anger, self-loathing,
and loneliness, she portrays people on the edge in her moody
short story collections -- The Gasoline Wars,
Little Face and Other Stories, and Who
Do You Love, a finalist for the National Book
Award -- and her well-wrought novels, including Wide
Blue Yonder and City
Boy, a portrait of a catastrophically malignant
marriage. Thompson continues to explore the dynamics between
men and women, as well as the diminishment of rural life,
family weirdness, what being female is really about, and
living in war time in her spectacular collection of pitch-perfect
short stories, Throw
like a Girl. Jean Thompson appeared on Open
Books in June 2007.

Hillary
Carlip brings high energy, high standards, unbridled creativity,
an effervescent sense of humor, and deep insight into everything
she does. A performer, writer, and master of multiple identities,
Carlip recounts her formative, or warping, girlhood experiences
in her funny and liberating memoir, Queen
of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording
to Plan, an American Booksellers Association
"Book Sense Pick" and a Borders "Top
Literary Memoir of the Year." Carlip is also the
creator, host, and editor of an esteemed literary website,
FRESH YARN, www.freshyarn.com,
an online magazine devoted to personal essays.

A performer as well as a writer, Hillary's penchant for alternative
personalities finds extraordinary expression in A
la Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers,
a book of stories and photographs in which Carlip transforms
herself into 26 diverse and compelling characters based on
her extensive collection of lost-and-found shopping lists.
According to Booklist (that would be me):

"Carlip
draws on her love of story, passion for performance and transformation,
eye for found art, and gift for comedic and empathic improvisation
in a unique portrait gallery. A populist Cindy Sherman, an
American Tracey Ullman, a female Eddie Murphy, and a disciple
of Lily Tomlin, Carlip used her quirky collection of discarded
shopping lists as inspiration for 26 characters, assuming
the identity of men and women shoppers of various ages, backgrounds,
and preoccupations. . . Each of Carlip's ingeniously composed,
funny, and insightful vignettes is a microcosm of struggle
and hope."

Hillary
Carlip is also a fabulously talented web
designer. In fact, you're experiencing one of her
online creations this very moment.

Hillary
appeared on Open Books when she was in Chicago for Columbia
College's annual literary festival, Story Week.

**
NEW ** Joel Greenberg

Chicagoan
Joel Greenberg is a birder, a naturalist, a lawyer, an environmental
activist, a tireless researcher, and a passionately observant,
insightful, involving, and witty writer. His first book is
a magnum opus, the unprecedented, avidly detailed, entertaining
and illuminating A
Natural History of the Chicago Region. In this
beautifully made book rich in historical photographs, Joel
teaches us about prairies and marshes, ravines and rivers,
the shore of the great lake Michigan, oak savannas and grasses,
butterflies and mussels and orchids and turtles and coyotes
and hawks and geese. He also writes incisively about a burgeoning,
incessantly busy, and shortsighted human population and the
rapid and transforming changes Chicagoans have brought to
what was for so long an incredibly fertile wilderness.

In
his second book, the nature writing anthologyOf
Prairie, Woods, & Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature
Writing, Joel Greenberg gathers together a revelatory
array of forgotten works about an overlooked yet essential
American place. Growing out of his extensive research for
A Natural History of the Chicago Region, this
unique anthology begins with the diary of Father Pierre-Francois-Xavier
de Charlevoix, a Jesuit who explored the area in 1721, and
moves forward to 1960. In between are many surprises. Listen
to Greenberg tell the intriguing stories behind this eye-opening
collection.

**
NEW ** Nancy
Goldstein (with
Tim Jackson)

The
moment I saw Jackie
Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist,
I knew I was in the presence of something fresh, exciting,
and important. Nancy Goldstein is the first to create a book
devoted to the life and work of pioneering cartoonist Jackie
Ormes (1911-1985), a "tireless" artist of conscience
and prominent activist. Glamorous and audacious, Ormes created
seductive, technically exceptional, and slyly hard-hitting
newspaper cartoons that entertained, inspired, and provoked
readers with indelible female characters: precocious and sharp-tongued
five-year-old Patty-Jo and her forbearing fashion-plate older
sister Ginger; and Torchy, a beautiful "campaigner for
environmental justice and racial equality."

Goldstein
recounts with enthusiasm and insight the trailblazing cartoonist's
remarkable story from her birth in Pittsburgh to her celebrity-filled
life in Chicago, and keenly analyzes Ormes' influential cartoons
and the role black newspapers played in the struggle for racial
equality. With a generous selection of Ormes' "forward-looking"
cartoons resurrected for the first time, and sharp insights
into the adversity Ormes faced as a woman of color and an
artist, Goldstein's Jackie
Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist
is a rare and affecting reading experience.

Also
on the show is Tim Jackson, who contributed precious artwork
to the book. He talks about Jackie Ormes from his perspective
as a Chicago-based, nationally syndicated cartoonist, and
a cartoon historian working on a book titled Pioneering Cartoonists
of Color.

In
Painter
in a Savage Land, the itinerary includes a doomed
sixteenth-century French fort on what became the site for
Jacksonville, Florida; the streets of Paris and London where
Huguenots and Lutherans were burned at the stake, and the
high-tension auction rooms of Sotheby's. The riveting story
of the long-lost artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is a veritable
tale of nine lives. Harvey marvels at the "epic strangeness"
of his subject's elusive life story and its embrace of radically
different, if equally tumultuous worlds. With a vivid cast
of real-life characters, gorgeous illustrations, unforeseen
and hugely entertaining side journeys, and a diabolical surprise
ending, Harvey's groundbreaking biography blows the dust off
significant chapters in European and American history and
makes for a rousing read. Happily, Harvey proves to be an
equally entrancing conversationalist.

Invisible No More: Voices of Literacy Chicago -- A Special
Reading Front Edition of Open Books

Open
Books, as I say at the beginning of every show, is about outstanding
books, remarkable writers, and the fine art of reading. It's
a celebration of the communion between reader and book, reader
and writer. When I speak with writers, our conversation roams
easily back and forth between the real world and the world
of ideas and the imagination, a realm we share by virtue of
our ability to read, and the boundless pleasure and knowledge
we acquire through books, magazines, newspapers, and web sites.
But I often wonder what life would be like without this key
to the workings of other minds, this portal onto other places
and other times. Millions of Americans do not read well enough
to enjoy books, or even read instructions, menus, street signs,
or medical prescriptions. If you cannot read and you cannot
write, you cannot participate in our society. You are silenced.
You feel invisible.

I
wanted to listen to the stories of people who refused to remain
without a voice, without a presence. And I wanted to talk
to people who are dedicated to helping others learn to read,
to write, and to work with confidence, dignity, and pleasure.
Thanks to friends, I made my way to an amazing place, a dynamic
and loving community, Literacy Chicago, a not-for-profit
organization located at 17 N. State Street in Chicago's Loop
(www.literacychicago.org).
A school that, to quote its mission statement, "empowers
individuals through words." A haven for adult learners
with free classes for students who want to increase their
reading skills, earn their GEDs, take English as a Second
Language courses, start their own business, and unchain their
creativity. Here are some of the voices of Literacy Chicago.

David
Rothenberg is a uniquely gifted, multifaceted, and intrepid
thinker and artist. A writer, philosopher, musician, and ecologist,
Rothenberg is the author of Sudden Music, Hand's
End, Always the Mountains, and Why
Birds Sing, a remarkable and unique mix of science,
history, literature, art, and music that has been published
in six languages and turned into a BBC documentary. His articles
have appeared in Parabola, Orion,
The Nation, Wired, and Sierra.
Professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology, Rothenberg is the founding editor of
the Terra Nova journal and book series, which includes
Writing on Air, Writing on Water,
and Writing the World: On Globalization. Rothenberg
is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, who plays music with
birds and other animals as well as with other people. His
seven CDs include Bangalore Wild and On
the Cliffs of the Heart. His forthcoming book, Thousand
Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, is due out
soon.

Sam
Weller

Chicago
writer Sam Weller is the author of The
Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury,
the first comprehensive and authorized biography of the great
and prescient Ray Bradbury, author of such indelible works
as The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, The
Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and Something
Wicked This Way Comes. Formerly the Midwest correspondent
for Publishers Weekly, Sam is a journalist
and book reviewer who writes for a variety of Chicago venues
and appears on WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station. Weller
is also a writing professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Barry
Silesky

Chicago
writer Barry Silesky is a poet, the author of a book of "short
shorts," One Thing That Can Save Us; the
editor and publisher for Another Chicago Magazine,
a literary journal, and a professor at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. He is also the author of two
groundbreaking biographies, Ferlinghetti: The Artist
in His Time and John
Gardner: The Life and Death of a Literary Outlaw,
a portrait of the mercurial and brilliant writer exceptional
in its insight, momentum, and empathy.

Stephen
Asma

Stephen
T. Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago,
is the author of Buddha for Beginners and
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. He wrote his
spiritual travelogue, The
Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the
Land of the Tattered Buddha after a teaching
stint at Phnom Penh's Buddhist Institute. In an electrifying
and frank mix of hair-raising anecdotes and expert analysis,
he explicates the vast difference between text-based Buddhist
teachings and daily life in a poor and politically volatile
Buddhist society. Amid tales of massage parlors, marijuana-spiced
pizza, and bloodshed, he cogently explains how Theravada
Buddhism, the form practiced throughout Southeast Asia,
differs from the Buddhism Westerners are familiar with,
and how entwined it is with animistic beliefs. This fusion
of Buddhist rationalism with superstition is but one of
many juxtapositions Asma relishes as he assesses the terrible
scars left by the Khmer Rouge and the profound self-possession
of the people he meets.

Left:
Michael Williams; Right: Richard Cahan

Richard
Cahan with Michael Williams on photographer Richard Nickel

Richard
Cahan, author of A Court that Shaped America,
and Michael Williams have teamed up to create unique and
powerful books that pair great photographs with incisive
commentary. They
All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's
Architecture is the cornerstone biography of
Chicago photographer and groundbreaking architectural conservationist
Richard Nickel. An ardent admirer of the work of architect
Louis Sullivan, Nickel was a lone voice protesting the ill-considered
and hasty destruction of Sullivan's Chicago masterpieces
during the 1950s and 1960s. Nickel salvaged whatever ornamentation
he could lay his hands on, and extensively photographed
buildings before and during their demolition. Nickel's tireless
efforts to document and preserve Sullivan's work led to
his tragic death in 1972 at age 43. In Richard Nickel's
Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, Cahan
and Williams present 250 of Nickel's elegant and resonant
photographs, many never printed before, accompanied by Nickel's
writings to create a volume of heartbreaking beauty. Their
next book, created with Bruce Moffat, is Chicago:
City on the Move, a spectacular selection of historic
photographs from the Chicago Transit Authority. Richard
Cahan and Michael Williams spoke to Open Books in December
2006.

Ilene
Cooper

Chicago
writer Ilene Cooper is Booklist's children's
book editor, a superb reviewer, and the author of more
than 30 and counting books for young people, ranging in age
from preschoolers to high schoolers, and in genres from fiction
to biography. Cooper's novels include the Kids from
Kennedy Middle Schoolseries, Sam I Am,
and I'll See You in My Dreams. Cooper's Jewish
Holidays All Year Round won the National Jewish
Book Award, her exceptional biography, Jack: The
Early Years of John F. Kennedy won the Society
for Midland Authors award, among others. Ilene has also
written The Dead Sea Scrolls, a young adult
biography, Up
Close: Oprah Winfrey, and an altogether beautiful
children's book, The
Golden Rule. The Illinois Reading Council designated
Ilene Cooper as the Prairie State Award winner for Excellence
in Writing for Children. Ilene Cooper spoke to Open Books
in May 2007.

In
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, Fletcher recounts
truly amazing stories of crazy crimes and the patient and
exacting men and women who solved them. Fletcher speaks
with 80 specialists, from evidence technicians to detectives,
blood spatter experts, DNA experts, trace analysts, forensic
anthropologists, a forensic botanist, firearms examiners,
cold case detectives, medical examiners, crime lab directors,
prosecutors, and defense attorneys. The always surprising
and affecting discussions cover the practical, such as the
challenges of outdoor crime scenes, and such metaphysical
concerns as feelings about death and the quest for truth.
Connie Fletcher appeared on Open Books in July 2006.

Elizabeth
Grossman (High Tech Trash -- with Giles Slade)

In
this edition of Open Books, we talk trash, e-waste that
is, with the "e" standing for electronics. E-waste,
also known as high-tech trash, consists of all the computers,
TVs, cell phones, CD players, and other digital gadgets
we throw out without stopping to think about what they contain
or where they go, how they're processed, whose water, soil,
and air they pollute, and whose health they endanger. Environmental
journalist Elizabeth Grossman, author of Watershed:
The Undamming of America, and Adventuring
Along the Lewis and Clark Trail, presents galvanizing
and unprecedented reports on the consequences of the manufacture
and disposal of our digital machines in High
Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health.
See Giles Slade, below, for our second high-tech expert
guest. This discussion took place on Open Books in June
2006.

Patricia
Hampl

Patricia
Hampl is a poet, an essayist, and a remarkably artistic
and creative memoirist. Writing of both earthly pilgrimages
and the inner journeys they precipitate, she brings a poet's
love of language, fluency in patterns and modulations, and
fascination with the life of the mind to unusual inquiries
into matters aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural. Hampl's
intrepidly candid, incisive, witty, and elegantly sensual
works of discovery include A Romantic Education,
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life,
and I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land
of Memory.

A
painting by Matisse is the catalyst for Blue
Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, a many-faceted
paean to art and the art of contemplation. In The
Florist's Daughter, Hampl portrays her temperamentally
oppositional parents with humor and poignancy, creating
a spirited tale of nature and nurture that illuminates our
bred-in-the-bone need for beauty, purpose, and love. Patricia
Hampl appeared on Open Books in December 2006.

A.M.
Homes

Homes
is a writer of verve and originality. Awarded fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment
of the Arts, she is the author of the unforgettable short
story collections Things You Should Know and
The Safety of Objects, a travel memoir about
Los Angeles, and five powerful novels: Jack, In a Country
of Mothers, The End of Alice, and Music
for Torching. This
Book will Save Your Life is a novel of rocketing
energy, wildly careening ups and downs, finely calibrated
humor, and spiky characters. Making clever use of the extremes
of L.A., both natural (tar pits, mud slides, fires, earthquakes)
and man-made (the list is endless), Homes orchestrates a midlife
crisis that transforms a money-counting neurotic into an unlikely
superhero in a novel of cinematic pizzazz that revitalizes
our understanding of love and goodness. Homes has also written
a memoir of distinctive power and resonance, The
Mistress's Daughter, which is as remarkable for
its crystalline prose, flinty wit, and agile candor as for
its arresting revelations regarding her irregular adoption.
As Homes chronicles her unnerving relationships, as a well-established
author, with her biological parents, she distills angst and
discovery into a riveting tale of nature and nurture that
encompasses America's great patchwork of immigrants and secrets,
and the evolution of women's lives. A. M. Homes appeared on
Open Books in May 2007.

Brad
Hooper

Brad
Hooper is the Adult Books editor for Booklist, a position
that demands both creativity and stamina (so many books, so
little space and time), and a versatile writer and critic.
He has published a number of short stories, essays, and reviews
in various publications, and written The Short Story
Readers Advisory: A Guide to the Best. Hooper
is also the author of a groundbreaking study of an immensely
popular living writer, The
Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist: An Appreciation, and
he is at work on a similarly revealing and enjoyable interpretation
of the work of Alice Munro, considered by many to be one of
the worlds very finest short story writers. Brad Hooper
appeared on Open Books in March 2005.

Leonard
Kniffel

Leonard
Kniffel is a librarian, a journalist, and the editor of
American Libraries. He is also the author
of A
Polish Son in the Motherland, a richly detailed
and involving chronicle of his journey to Poland to search
for long lost-family members, especially relatives of his
grandmother, who played a key role in Kniffel's Michigan
childhood. Kniffel's Polish adventures include planned genealogical
research and serendipitous meetings, moments of terror on
the highways and embracing pleasure in the company of newly
discovered family and "hard-won friends made in the
mother tongue." Detailed descriptions of food, his
struggles with the language, the countryside, the lives
of newspaper reporters and a wine merchant, the excitement
of meeting fifty cousins in five days, and startling family
history, including the story of his great-great-grandmother
who outlived 6 husbands had famously tiny feet, make for
an anecdotal feast, and grant readers a fresh view of Polish
life and culture. Leonard Kniffel spoke with Open Books
in April 2005.

Jeff
Libman

As
talk about immigration and immigrants' rights become even
more heavily politicized and polarizing, it is important
to remember that we are not talking about statistics, but
about men, women, and children struggling to live safe and
productive lives. Like our great-grandparents, grandparents,
parents, and ourselves, today's immigrants are often forced
to leave home under traumatic and tragic circumstances,
only to face daunting challenges in their new world. Jeff
Libman is a musician (his new CD is December Wave),
an English as a Second Language teacher on the staff of
Harry S. Truman College in Chicago, and author of An
Immigrant Class: Oral Histories from Chicago's Newest Immigrants.
In this unusual, clarifying, and generously proportioned
book illustrated with photographs by Steve Kagan, Libman
shares the stories of 20 immigrants from all around the
world who are creating new lives in Chicago. Jeff Libman
spoke to Open Books in December 2005.

Phillip
Lopate

Phillip
Lopate has written fiction, poetry, and architectural and
movie criticism, but he is best known as an adept and urbane
essayist. His frank and nervy autobiographical essays run
the gamut from confessional to hilarious, elegiac, piquant,
and curmudgeonly. Over the years Lopate's vivid and involving
essays have been gathered into various collections, including
Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre,
Portrait of My Body, and Getting Personal:
Selected Writings.

Lopate's
authoritative The
Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical
Era to the Present has become a much cherished
standard. In a tour de force,Waterfront:
A Journey around Manhattan, Lopate combines
his knowledge of New York culture, architecture, and literature
with the more visceral understandings he has acquired as
an avid walker and city explorer to create a thought-provoking
history of the city's once bustling, long-neglected, now
rediscovered waterfront. Lopate continued his inquiry into
the history of maritime New York in Seaport: New York's
Vanished Waterfront (2004), a sterling collection
of historical photographs, and has authored a stunning monograph
on photographer Rudy Burckhardt. Phillip Lopate appeared
on Open Books in March 2004.

Bill
McKibben

Beginning
with his prescient treatise on global warming, The
End of Nature (1989), environmentalist and hard-working
journalist of conscience Bill McKibben has been tirelessly
investigating and elucidating some of the most intriguing,
obdurate, and baffling aspects of our lives. A recipient
of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Lannan Literary
Award for Nonfiction, McKibben has written about overpopulation
in Maybe One, and our enthrallment to technological
innovations in Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered
Age. In other works, he assesses our television
habit, what we learn from pushing our bodies and minds to
the limit, and appreciation for the glory of nature. In
Wandering
Home, he hikes his beloved home turf in Vermont
and the Adirondacks, stopping to visit with people who have
found ecologically nurturing ways to work and live. In Deep
Economy, McKibben takes measure of the unintended
consequences of our oil-fueled growth-oriented economy,
and issues a call for a new economic paradigm, that of a
"deep economy" born of sustainable and sustaining
communities anchored in local resources.

A remarkably active and generous writer, McKibben pops up
everywhere, contributing to literary projects, supporting
other writers by writing illuminated introductions for their
books, organizing grassroots campaigns, and appearing in
the documentary, The 11th Hour. Bill McKibben
spoke with Open Books in October 2006.

James
McManus

Chicago
writer James McManus is a poet and a novelist, his novels
include Going to the Sun and Chin Music.
He is also a nervy practitioner of immersion journalism,
and a mega-serious poker player. McManus has written about
high-stakes poker tournaments in his bestseller, Positively
Fifth Street. McManus has also written about
the price of living an unhealthy life, and the luck of the
draw when it comes to genetically based disease in Physical:
An American Checkup. A mix of reportage and
memoir, Physical begins with McManus' experience
at the Mayo Clinic, where he undergoes an "executive
physical." His moment-by-moment chronicle leads to
a sharp critique of our health care system, family stories,
and a great array of observations about illness and injury,
the politics of medicine, the failings of health insurance,
and all kinds of ironies and paradoxes. James McManus appeared
on Open Books in February 2006.

Dan
Mathews

Dan
Mathews is an audacious animal rights activist, the vice
president for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA), and the author of a mischievously funny and passionate
book, Committed:
A Rabble Rouser's Memoir. An "agitator
by nature," Mathews mixes outrageous humor with dishy
anecdotes and searing revelations to create a wildly entertaining
memoir and a spirited overview of a serious social issue.
Openly gay and steeled by the bullying he endured as a boy,
Mathews has always felt empathy for animals. Initially a
receptionist for PETA in 1985, he proved to be an outside-the-box
thinker and daredevil protestor, and has advocated for animal
rights all over the world, a calling that has landed him
in jail all too often. The force of his convictions and
his love of life electrify every page. Dan Mathews appeared
on Open Books in April 2007.

Mitch
Myers

Writer
and music critic Mitch Myers has written for Downbeat,
Rolling Stone, the Village Voice,
and High Times, and contributed pop commentaries
to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Myers
also maintains the Shel Silverstein Archive in Chicago.
The nephew of author, poet, songwriter, cartoonist, and artist
Silverstein -- who is renowned for the cherished children's
books Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic,
and Falling Up -- Myers introduces a new collection
of Silverstein's work for adults, a travel journal titled
Playboy's Silverstein Around the World. Mitch
Myers's inventive first book, The
Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock and Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling,
is a dynamic blend of rock-and-roll lore, blues and jazz musings,
and spellbinding tales that take readers on some devilishly
smart forays into the realms of myth and magic, and on some
intriguing time-travel adventures. Mitch Myers spoke to Open
Books in April 2007.

Sy
Montgomery

Renowned
nature writer Sy Montgomery has traveled to wilderness regions
all around the world, and writes radiant books about elusive
animals and wild places with the lyricism and insights of
a poet, and the knowledge and reasoning of a scientist.
In Spell of the Tiger, Montgomery chronicles
her journey to Sundarbans in Bengal, India, where tigers
hunt humans. In Journey of the Pink Dolphins,
she reports on her often baffling attempts to study the
freshwater pink dolphin, long the subject of myth and nearly
unknown to science. In Search
for the Golden Moon Bear, Montgomery tells the
story of her travels throughout Southeast Asia with evolutionary
biologist Gary Galbreath on a quest for the rarely seen
golden moon bear. Rather than traverse pristine wilderness,
however, the searchers visit captive bears, and confront
the horrors of the illegal wildlife trade (second only to
drugs in scope and violence) and the grave suffering of
endangered hill tribes. In her most personal book, The
Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary life of Christopher Hogwood,
Montgomery writes about life with her much-loved 750-pound
pig companion. A highly intelligent and very kind pig, Christopher
was known for miles around as people brought food, and children
fussed over him like the pasha he was. Christopher helped
Montgomery overcome her shyness, and brought her profound
solace. Christopher's "bliss was contagious" in
life, and remains so on the pages of this funny, revealing,
and deeply moving story of the profound bond between animals
and people. Sy Montgomery has appeared twice on Open Books.
See Writers
on the Air for our first conversation. This
one took place in July 2006.

Arthur
Plotnik

Language
maven Arthur Plotnik is a contributing editor to The
Writer, former editor of American Libraries,
and the author of writing books that have become standards
in the field: The Elements of Editing and The
Elements of Expression. A zestful, inventive,
and irreverent expert, Plotnik combines storytelling and humor
with clear and inspiring explication. He took time away from
the word mines to write The Urban Tree Book,
an unusual guide to city trees beautifully illustrated by
artist Mary Phelan, Plotnik's wife, then dove back into the
how-to world with Spunk
& Bite: A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style.
In Spunk & Bite, a clever play on Strunk &
White, Plotnik offers unique and exciting suggestions
about the subtlest aspects of prose style, from guidelines
for creating a "syntax of surprise," to a mind-expanding
discussion of "megaphors and miniphors," to the
feng shui of writing, and the art of word coinage (did you
know that Shakespeare gave us "puke," and Oscar
Wilde coined "dude"?) Arthur Plotnik worked word
magic on Open Books in January 2006.

Giles
Slade (High Tech Trash -- with Elizabeth Grossman)

Canadian
writer Giles Slade survived a protracted stay in academia;
learned to think on his feet as a reporter; had a blast
writing pulp fiction, specifically action adventure novels;
taught at various colleges and universities in Asia and
the Persian Gulf, and then became fascinated by consumer
culture, built-in obsolescence, and the trouble with our
trash-producing habit of forever upgrading and increasing
our flocks of digital gadgets. Slade's informative, entertaining,
and alarming Made
to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
analyzes the forces that drive consumerism, and the impetus
for and consequences of our throw-it-away approach to life.
Made to Break won the IPPY (Independent Publisher
Association's) national gold medal for the best environmental
book of 2007. Slade's articles and opinion pieces appear
in various newspapers and magazines, and he blogs on The
Huffington Post while working on a new book. Giles Slade
joined Elizabeth Grossman (see above) on Open Books in June
2006.

Annick
Smith is the daughter of Hungarian émigrés
and photographers Helene and Stephen Deutch. Born in Paris,
Smith grew up in Chicago, where her parents were friends
with Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and many other notables.
Smith moved to Montana, where she worked in film, producing
Heartland and A River Runs Through
It. She edited The Last Best Place: A Montana
Anthology with her husband, William Kittredge. Smith's
essays and travel writing have appeared in Audubon,
Outside, and other venues, and she has written
thoughtful and poetic books about nature, place, and family,
including Homestead and In
This We Are Native: On Going Away and Coming Home.
Smith shares her memories of Chicago, including a visit
to the Art Institute of Chicago, during which she "discovered
that life and art and nature are one thing," and of
summers on the dunes along the southern shore of Lake Michigan
in Fresh
Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes (see
Alison Swan, below). Smith writes, "I, for one, desire
always the physical. Stone, leaf, rain, blood." Accompanied
by her lovely mother, Helene, age 100, Annick Smith joined
Alison Swan on Open Books in December 2006.

Alison
Swan's writings have appeared in many publications including
Fourth Genre and Peninsula: Essays
and Memoirs from Michigan. Swan is also the editor
of an unusual and unusually beautiful anthology, Fresh
Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes, a collection
of essays, poems, and memoirs about life in the Great Lakes
basin, home to the fresh water seas Lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan,
Ontario, and Superior, and a unique and precious place on
Earth. Swan has gathered works by women writers born in
Great Lakes territory, writers who migrated there, and writers
for whom the Great Lakes serve as five watery muses. Contributors
include Bonnie Jo Campbell, Laura Kasischke, Stephanie Mills,
Susan Power, Judith Strasser, Jane Urquhart, Annick Smith
(see her bio above), and the host of Open Books, Donna Seaman.
Alison Swan appeared with Annick Smith on Open Books in
December 2006.

Chicago
poet Elise Paschen is the author of the collections Home:
Coasts and Infidelities, winner of
the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared
in the New Yorker, New Republic,
and Ploughshares, among other publications,
and in numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the
Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of
North America, A Formal Feeling Comes,
and The Poetry Anthology. Former executive
director of the Poetry Society of America, Paschen was
a cofounder of "Poetry in Motion," a nationwide
program that places poetry posters in subways and buses. Paschen
is also editor of Poetry Speaks to Children,
and coeditor of the best-selling Poetry Speaksand
Poetry
Speaks Expanded, a big book of superb poems accompanied
by CDs of major poets reading their work.

Dan
Beachy-Quick ( A double interview with Chicu Reddy)

Dan
Beachy-Quick is a poet of artifacts, early American history,
and the culture of nature. In North True,
South Bright he illuminates our intricate connections
to nature. Spell is a complex and enthralling
poetic response to Moby Dick, and in Mulberry
Beachy-Quick's finely spun and intricately woven lyrics mesh
consciousness with sensuousness. Trees are spokes in the wheels
of traveling meditations on the transformations and cycles
of life. As birds build nests, humans alter the living world:
"Sap: syrup. Pine: plank." Beachy-Quick's incantatory
poems create a palimpsest of water, blood, and ink; veins
in leaves, wings, and hands; spider webs, a silk scarf, a
swaddling cloth, and a shroud. Tree rings hold time, pages
are a book's leaves, people of the past have left their marks,
and the poet is steeped in "the transparent ever."

Srikanth
"Chicu" Reddy(A double
interview with Dan Beachy-Quick)

Poet
Chicu Reddy, an assistant professor in the English department
at the University of Chicago, is the author of Facts
for Visitors, a collection of iridescent beauty
and wistful mystery. Reddy's poems conjure haunted landscapes
-- places in transition, collapse, and decay -- but the canny
narrator marvels rather than laments. A profoundly visual
poet, Reddy creates mise-en-scenes reminiscent of the boxes
of Joseph Cornell, Indian miniatures, and Hieronymus Bosch's
surreal cosmos. Lush and magical, Reddy's poems are also evocative
of such human trespasses as war, prejudice, and oppression,
as well as the transcendence of language, love, and awe.

Diane
di Prima

The
best-known and most important woman writer in the Beat movement,
poet di Prima has written many books of poetry, including
Loba, and a famously explicit fictionalized tale of
her reign of queen of the beats, Memoir of a Beatnik.
In her actual memoir, Recollections
of My Life as a Woman, she presents an equally
frank self-portrait but on a far grander scale. Delving deeply
into her past, from her brutal New York childhood to her artistic
and bohemian life, a great swirl of Eros and creativity, she
transcends the personal to illuminate the primal cultural
and psychological issues of twentieth-century America. Di
Prima's electrifying perceptions into the nature of sex and
love, men and women, race and identity, art and beauty, drugs
and spirituality, and freedom and commitment keep readers
glued to the page.

Kevin Young

Kevin
Young is a poet who looks back as he moves forward, who writes
of place and of displacement, of the order and grace art bestows
and of the randomness and sorrow life delivers. Young attended
Harvard University, held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford,
and received an MFA from Brown. He is a Guggenheim fellow
and is currently a professor of English and creative writing
at Emory University. As an editor, Young has created a fresh
and powerful anthology titled Giant Steps: The New Generation
of African American Writers, The Everyman's
Anthology of Blues Poems, and John Berryman:
Selected Poems.

As
for his own work, Lucille Clifton selected Young's first book,
Most Way Home for the National Poetry Series
and it won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Young's
collection To Repel Ghosts is a jazzy epic tribute
to painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jelly Roll: A Blues,
was a finalist for the National Book Award and won
the Paterson Poetry Prize. InBlackMaria
and A. K. A. Jones, Young celebrates improvisation
in art and life as he toys with every convention known to
noir and pulls off some of the wittiest, sexiest, and most
barbed put-downs, come-ons, and linguistic sleights of hand
found in contemporary poetry. And in his most overtly beautiful
book to date, For
the Confederate Dead, he pays arresting tribute
to various mentors and considers African American history,
pairing humor and deep feeling in tonic poems of mischief
and power.

Marc
Smith (with Mark Eleveld)

Chicago
poet Marc Smith created a new art form and launched a movement
in Chicago in 1987 when he staged a competitive poetry performance
that became the prototype for what is now known all around
the world as the poetry slam. Smith's conviction that poetry
is part of life and not a rarefied form reserved for the elite
has had a profound influence on poets and poetry, as has his
emphasis on the oral aspect of poetry, and on poetry "live."
Nicknamed "Slampapi," Smith is the author of Crowdpleasers
and coeditor with Mark Eleveld of The
Spoken Word Revolution, a dynamic anthology that
traces the evolution of modern spoken-word poetry from the
Beats to rap to hip-hop and beyond.

Mark
Eleveld (with Marc Smith)

A
high school English teacher in Joilet, Illinois, Mark Eleveld
is also co-founder and director of EM Press, a small
house devoted to poetry. And he edited the groundbreaking
poetry anthologies, The
Spoken Word Revolution and The
Spoken Word Revolution Redux. In each, Eleveld
matches insightful commentary by such established poets as
Billy Collins and Marvin Bell with poems of high energy and
deep feeling, vivid imagery and mischievous wit by a slew
of performance poets. Eleveld, coeditor Marc Smith, and their
diverse contributors celebrate the verve, artistry, and significance
of today's performance poetry, explore spoken word poetry's
connection to music, and trace its roots back to the old-as-song
tradition of life-sustaining poetry.

Nikki
Giovanni

The
legendary activist, a poet of conscience and a crucial voice
in the literature of civil rights, black power, and women's
rights, Nikki Giovanni is the author of more than two dozen
books of poems and essays, rants and stories. Her many influential
books include Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment;
My House; Blues: For All Changes;Love Poems; Sacred
Cows...and Other Edibles; Racism 101; The Collected Poems
of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998; Quilting
the Black-Eyed Pea andAcolytes.
Considered a pioneer in spoken word poetry, Giovanni performs
her work on the glorious CD set, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry
Collection. Giovanni has won many, many awards, including
more than 20 honorary degrees, the Rosa Parks
Woman of Courage Award, and the Langston Hughes Medal
for Outstanding Poetry. A galvanizing speaker, forever
young and spirited, Giovanni is distinguished professor
in English at Virginia Tech, where she spoke in the wake
of the Virginia Tech massacre, offering catharsis and hope.
Nikki Giovanni graced Open Books with her presence in November
2004.

Patricia
Monaghan

Patricia
Monaghan, winner of the Pushcart Prize and the Friends
of Literature award, is a prolific and versatile writer.
Her poetry collections include Dancing with Chaos,
and Home
Front, a powerful collection about war. Monaghan's
poetry has been turned into songs in collaboration with
the folk composer Michael Smith on "Songs of the
Kerry Madwoman", and the Alaskan group the Derry
Aires on "Seasons of the Witch". Monaghan
has written two major works on mythology, The Book
of Goddesses and Heroines, and The Encyclopedia
of Celtic Myth and Folklore. The
Red-Haired Girl from the Bog explores Irish
ecology, myth, and folklore. Monaghan has also written an
introduction to goddess spirituality, The Goddess
Path, and a book of translations of classic goddess
poetry, The Goddess Companion.

A
senior fellow at the Black Earth Institute, a progressive
Wisconsin think-tank dedicated to articulating the traditional
connections between arts, science and ecology, and spirituality,
Patricia Monaghan appeared on Open Books in July 2006.

Robert
Pinsky

Robert
Pinsky is an exceptional and world-renowned poet, critic,
and translator. As Poet Laureate of the United States
from 1997 to 2000, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project,
encouraging Americans of all ages and backgrounds to share
their favorite poems. The project was a phenomenal success,
and Pinsky became a poetry envoy, bringing poetry to the
public on television and in many other venues, and publishing
eye-opening "favorite poem" anthologies, including
America's Favorite Poems. In The
Life of David, Pinsky brings his learnedness,
literary finesse, and flair for vigorous interpretation
to a vibrant and imaginative portrait of David, the biblical
warrior, poet, king, and, according to Pinsky, wise guy.
Pinsky's books of poems include The Figured Wheel:
New and Collected Poems, Jersey Rain,
and Gulf
Music, a collection shaped by the ripple effect
of 9/11, Katrina, and contemplation of imprisonment and
torture and the persistence of prejudice. Pinsky summons
up a zydeco beat, weaves in strands of family history, pays
tributes to Whitman and Dickinson, Ray Charles and Doctor
John, retrieves lost meanings and symbols in poems crafted
to bridge the gulf between the past and the present, the
living and the dead. Pinsky brings great vitality, erudition,
artistry, and humor to his work, drawing on his love of
music, mischievously spanning the divide between great literature
and pop culture, and reveling in the beauty, resiliency,
and light of language.Robert Pinsky appeared on Open Books
in October 2005.

Steven
Schroeder

Poet,
philosopher, and translator Steven Schroeder grew up the
Texas Panhandle, and, as he writes, "his poetry continues
to be rooted in the experience of the Plains, which teaches
attention to 'nothing that is not there' but more especially
to 'the nothing that is.'" His poetry has appeared
in a number of literary journals, including Georgetown
Review, Halcyon, Mid-America
Poetry Review, Petroglyph, Poetry
East, Rhino, and Texas Review.
Schroeder's books of poetry include Theory of Cats,
East of Taos, On the Road to Lhasa,
Revolutionary Patience, Fallen Prose,
and The Imperfection of the Eye. Schroeder
has taught in various places in the U.S., and in Shenzhen,
China, and he has a passion for Chinese poetry. Schroeder
helped found the Virtual Artists Collective (www.vacpoetry.org),
a showcase for music, poetry, and art, as well as a small
press specializing in poetry. With his deep faith in creativity
and freedom, Schroeder is a guru to many. He writes in the
poem "Xie Xie":